On September 18 I discussed the confession of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, that he had experienced some heavy doubts about God’s existence, based on God’s distressing lack of appearance on the planet. Surprisingly, though, Welby had no doubts about Jesus. I found that quite astonishing, for Jesus has meaning to Welby only as the son of God (as well as a third of the Godhead, given that Anglicans accept the Trinity). How can you doubt God and be certain about the divinity of Jesus?
At any rate, Julia Baird (an Australian opinion writer for the New York Times who also has a Ph.D. in history) has taken to her keyboard to defend Welby in a Sept. 25 Times op-ed,, “Doubt as a sign of faith.” Her thesis is, in her words, this: “Doubt is a crucial part of faith.”
But her piece does not start off well:
Certainty is so often overrated.
This is especially the case when it comes to faith, or other imponderables.
Overrated? Wouldn’t you want to be certain that your faith was right? After all, you’re staking a lot of your life, and all of your afterlife, on what you believe. And certainty in other matters, so long as it’s supported by evidence, is what you want. (I think she’s talking about real empirical certainty, not simply one’s assertion that one is right.)
To defend her thesis, Baird first lists some religious people who have had religious doubts, including Welby himself , Mother Teresa (her diary entries on this are now well known), C. L. Lewis, Flannery O’Conner, Benjamin Franklin, and even Jesus himself, who, says Baird, cried out on the cross, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” Well, that might not be Jesus’s doubt about God’s existence, but anguish about why God didn’t save him.
Indeed, according to scripture Jesus did say that, but in only two of the four Gospels, Matthew and Mark. Here are his final words in all four gospels:
- Luke 23:34: Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.
- Luke 23:43: Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.
- John 19:26–27: Woman, behold your son.Son Behold your mother.
- Matthew 27:46 & Mark 15:34 My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?
- John 19:28: I thirst.
- John 19:29-30: It is finished.
- Luke 23:46: Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.
If Baird quoted Luke or John, we wouldn’t see that doubt, so she’s cherry-picking. Did Luke and John simply leave out those crucial words of doubt, or did someone make them up? (Baird appears to believe they are real, for she implies, as we’ll see below, that she’s a Baptist.)
But never mind. Her view that doubt is inherent in faith, is largely (but not completely) correct. How can it not be for many? If you’re committed to believing a bunch of superstition lacking evidence, and yet you’re a thinking person who bases the rest of your life on things for which you’d like evidence, then sometimes you must wonder if all this stuff is real. That’s all well and good, but, given the nature of faith, how does one resolve those doubts? This is the question Baird avoids:
Just as courage is persisting in the face of fear, so faith is persisting in the presence of doubt. Faith becomes then a commitment, a practice and a pact that is usually sustained by belief. But doubt is not just a roiling, or a vulnerability; it can also be a strength. Doubt acknowledges our own limitations and confirms — or challenges — fundamental beliefs, and is not a detractor of belief but a crucial part of it.
This is truly making a virtue of necessity. For there is no good way for a believer to actually resolve those doubts, for there is no evidence to appeal to. How can Welby call on evidence to convince himself that God really exists? After all, it’s that lack of evidence that raised his doubts in the first place! At least Baird admits that faith is “persisting in the presence of doubt,” that is, pretending that something exists when you’re not sure it does.
No, there are only two ways to quell those doubts. First, just decide to quietly shelve them and convince yourself that you were right all along, or conjure up some “evidence,” like a frozen waterfall or a beautiful evensong, to get you back on track. But that is just confirmation bias. Or, you can do what Baird’s pastor does, and just say that maybe it doesn’t matter if what you believe is true, so long as it produces good things:
My local pastor, Tim Giovanelli, a Baptist whose ocean-swimming prowess has lassoed scores of surfers and swimmers into his church, puts it simply: “For Welby, myself and many others, it is not that we have certainty but have seen the plausibility of faith and positive impact it can make. In a broken world, that can be enough.”
But where does the “plausibility” come from? Doesn’t Giovanelli really mean “logical possibility”? It is the mistaking of the logical possibility (and emotional appeal) of a God for the plausibility of a God (something that Alvin Plantinga does continually, and on purpose), that mistakenly leads the doubters back to faith.
Yes, religious doubt is natural, and inevitable in rational people, but the whole goal of religion is to quash it. Granted, some, like Welby, will admit it (though I suspect that people like Al Mohler, Ken Ham, and William Lane Craig don’t have such doubts), but in the end they always decide that they were right all along—on no evidence—and plow ahead as before, like a ship going around an iceberg. I doubt that Welby’s newfound doubts will affect his sermons or public pronouncements from now on: he will certainly act as if God and Jesus exist when he talks to his flock.
At the end, Baird compares the doubts of believers with those of rationalists, quoting the mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell:
If we don’t accept both the commonality and importance of doubt, we don’t allow for the possibility of mistakes or misjudgments. While certainty frequently calcifies into rigidity, intolerance and self-righteousness, doubt can deepen, clarify and explain. This is, of course, a subject far broader than belief in God. [JAC: Really? How can religious doubt itself “clarify and explain” without some way of resolving it?]
The philosopher Bertrand Russell put it best. The whole problem with the world, he wrote, is that “the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
But there are two differences between the kind of doubt evinced by Baird and that mentioned by Russell. First, when a scientist or empiricist doubts something, say string theory, they don’t go around proclaiming that it is true. They admit constantly that it is plausible but unsettled. Scientific “truth” only comes with substantial empirical verification. In contrast, the believers who have doubts, like Welby, ultimately go their merry way and forget that they had those doubts, saying that they’ve been resolved by further reflection. But reflection can’t resolve doubt unless you have a way of adjudicating the conflicting positions.
And that brings us to a crucial difference between religion and science. In science doubts are resolved by evidence. If you don’t have evidence that string theory is correct, you don’t tell yourself and others, “upon deeper reflection, I have clarified to myself that it is indeed right.” If you don’t have good evidence, you stop promoting your theory as the truth; instead, you persist in asserting that it’s undecided. But will be a cold day in July (in the northern hemisphere!) when Welby and Baird, who have even less evidence for God than physicists have for string theory, start doubting God’s existence publicly and frequently. Unless the doubts of the faithful are resolved by “deep reflection”—almost always the case—they become nonbelievers.
Baird’s article is a prime example of what I call The Great Sausage Machine of Theology: a mental appartus that converts scientific and empirical necessities—in this case a lack of evidence for one’s beliefs—into theological virtues. And, like sausage-making, the working of the Theological Grinder are best kept hidden. By exposing them, Baird has revealed their intellectual vacuity.
